As much as you might think this is out there, I have a hunch, however stupid it might be that leaks about candidates could in fact come out this way.
it might not even be Obamas team leaking. Lets sat a partisan person who works for the NSA wants to destroy a candidate. They could in fact do all the research themselves rather than anyone even close to Obama.
I look at one direct example of Herman Cain. How did the press ever get ahold of the fact that he was paying women out? Literally, you could say the women spoke up, but with the NSA, you could say someone who works at the NSA leaked the information just because they didn't like Herman Cain to begin with.
Now that's scary. Someone's reputation could be destroyed just by a rogue NSA agent.
What I find scary is that we live in a nation where such scandals are capable of ending political careers. Where we even have political careers. Where we think it's okay to be worried about single politicians rather than policy in general, because eliminating a politician is capable of shuttering a policy. Where protecting someone's reputation is a necessary political factor.
This reminds me of the 1998 movie Enemy of the State (I know, I know its hollywood but bare with me) where the NSA targeted Will Smith's character for having the video tape of them assassinating a politician. The NSA's first course of action (after wiretapping his phones) was to publicly discredit him in the media, lose his job, etc.
So if he did leak the video tape to the press, he would appear to be a quack.
Then again, in reality NSA wouldn't have been able to wiretap him or track him down independently, since they can't conduct direct surveillance domestically by policy.
Then again, in reality NSA wouldn't have been able to wiretap him or track him down independently, since they can't conduct direct surveillance domestically by policy.
Except when they do it by mistake during a presidential election:
In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff. [1]
Yes, "by mistake". I wonder how many crimes we could get away with if we just said we did it by mistake, like they do.
There should be a zero tolerance policy for this sort of thing. The government itself and authorities need to be held at a higher standard than everyone else.
> This reminds me of the 1998 movie Enemy of the State (I know, I know its hollywood but bare with me)
All jokes aside, that is a great Tony Scotty movie and it has been acknowledged as such even by the "cocky" French cinema critics from Cahiers du Cinema.
You don't even have to go to a fictional account to look at how "the system" will seek to discredit people who could harm it. Take a look at Adrian Schoolcraft [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft], who was in the NYPD and tried to show investigators about corruption within the force.
"After voicing his concerns, Schoolcraft was reportedly harassed and reassigned to a desk job. After he left work early one day, a swat unit illegally entered his apartment, physically abducted him and forcibly admitted him to a psychiatric facility, where he was held against his will for six days."
>Then again, in reality NSA wouldn't have been able to wiretap him or track him down independently, since they can't conduct direct surveillance domestically by policy.
That's like saying your career as a web developer ended, but at least you're still a web designer at another company in another field. It misses the point that the project you championed for five years because it provided real value to real customers just got scrapped and tossed just to make sure none of your taint is left upon it, and half the people you helped hire in order to make it a high quality product got fired because they didn't spend enough time kissing ass rather than shipping code and you were covering for their occasional, warranted antagonism.
I honestly don't give a fuck about politicians' after-careers. You failed to lynch them. Fine. We don't do seppuku in this country. Fine.
No, I care, for instance, that Obama had to burn down his entire capacity to move and shake politically just to get a half-assed piece of healthcare reform into effect, and that it very well may have failed if Snowden had happened three years earlier.
I think you missed my point.. also, individual politicians represent their respective districts, I would sure hope that people in a democratic society worry about them
With current reelection rates over 80% in congress for the last fifty years [1], one wonders if they have any need to represent their districts at all.
http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php
NSA surveillance raises real concerns about blackmail, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Remember, the NSA is tapping into information that, e.g., Google and Yahoo were apparently sending unencrypted between their international data centers. One of the pieces of information that's coming out from these NSA revelations is that there is a ton of private information within these companies that's exposed to far too many people.[1]
From the point of view of political blackmail, there is every bit as much reason to be worried about rogue Facebook engineers as there is to be worried about rogue NSA agents. There seems to be some myopia among technologists as to this point, an idea that "NSA agent = bad" and "Facebook engineer = good" and a projection of negative intentions onto the former and positive intentions onto the latter. But at the end of the day, there is money in political blackmail, and it's not like there is no history of giant corporations engaging in political blackmail, or at least opportunistic employees at giant corporations engaging in such activity.
The internet as it exists today is a system where "private" information is shared between you and thousands of your closest friends at Google, Yahoo, AT&T, Verizon, Facebook, Comcast, etc. The entire system, where information flows unencrypted through trusted service providers, is naive and broken. It was been broken since the earliest days of the internet, with clear-text protocols like SMTP, and that brokenness has simply piled on over the years.
[1] While I don't support Lavabit's position of refusing to comply with lawful warrants, I do admire their architecture where the government has had to go to the highest levels of the company to get the information. It couldn't simply lean on some relatively low-level system administrator who had access to the unencrypted data.
There is at least one case of character assassination that we can with near certainty attribute to the US surveillance apparatus.
Eliot Spitzer was Governor of New York, former AG of New York, famous gadfly of Wall Street, and a top contender before the 2008 election to be Obama's pick for Attorney General, when it was discovered that he was paying prostitutes.
The explanation as to how this information was discovered is as follows: he paid for these "services" using a wire transfer to the madam, who had created an "anonymous" corporation to collect payments, as a convenience to her wealthy and famous clients. According to Wikipedia, "The investigation of Spitzer was reportedly initiated after North Fork Bank reported suspicious transactions to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network as required by the Bank Secrecy Act, which was enhanced by Patriot Act provisions, enacted to combat terrorist activity such as money-laundering." [1]
Every bank is required by the Patriot Act to file "Suspicious Activity Reports" regarding certain activity to FinCEN, which reports must be kept secret from the person being reported upon. SARs are typically filed electronically, and then centralized in FinCEN review centers, where patterns are analyzed and information is distributed to law enforcement personnel. Spritzer was being monitored because one of the chief criteria used in determining whether a SAR should be filed is whether an individual being monitored is a "Politically Exposed Person" or PEP (that acronym is actually used actively). [2]
In other words, by explicit provision of the Patriot Act and US DoT regulations, all financial activities of politicians must be monitored and reported on in secret by financial institutions.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want the US Attorney General to be someone who frequents call girls. It was Spitzer's own self-destructiveness that created the opportunity for this take down. But you have to ask, if it weren't for his aggressive anti-Wall St. stance, would he have been targeted? Perhaps he wouldn't have been. There are certainly similar transgressions committed by less "problematic" politicians that never leak. For instance, even after the whole Spitzer hullabaloo, we don't know who any of this madam's other clients were, even though it was reported that some were famous politicos.
What's most significant here, though, is that we don't need to speculate about how this power can work to the advantage of certain interest groups.
In this case, broad-spectrum surveillance may have resulted in Eric Holder becoming AG at the height of the financial crisis, instead of the one man perhaps most qualified by experience and temperament to prosecute financial crimes, Eliot Spitzer.
But you have to ask, if it weren't for his aggressive anti-Wall St. stance, would he have been targeted? No, he wouldn't have been.
That's silly. Plenty of people have been busted for prostitution without being politicians. For example, NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer busted a whole bunch of people who weren't politicians:
As for special surveillance of PEPs, sounds like a good thing to me. Can you think of a reason that our politicians should not be subject to extra scrutiny?
The problem with your post is exactly why selective prosecution is the very embodiment of an oppressive regime. After all they DID break the law, and they SHOULD be punished right? Who could argue with that.
Meanwhile half of Washington is doing the same thing, with the full knowledge of people like the NSA, and the facts are sure to come out if they take a meaningful stand against their agenda.
The example of the soviet election is also an excellent one. They knew every bit of information about every candidate, and merely had to expose the ones that didn't toe the line properly as the criminals or terrible people they were.
Just like every single other person ever, they did something illegal or unsavory at some point in their life.
Make no aspersions, the kind of information the NSA holds is complete and total political power.
Best post in the thread. This is exactly the problem.
Now, an interesting question is, what happens if everyone knew almost everything? This is the alternative scenario. If the end of privacy is more ubiquitous and democratic, the power of the secret services would shrink. It might lead to a change of our laws and social norms to something that more realistically represents our reality.
I'm not optimistic that this would be a good or even better world, but this is the best argument I've heard from the people who are not afraid of the end of privacy. I would count Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt into that group, but also many of my friends.
Which norms and laws would change? I can imagine that e.g. the use of certain drugs like cocaine and sexual behaviors like sado maso and yes prostitution would be the first to be tolerated by the majority. In some societies, that is already the case. A more difficult to swallow reality might be pedophily. I'm quite sure that child abuse would always be unacceptable but simply being pedophilic might be accepted as normal for a certain percentage of the population.
The power inherent in not allowing others to know what bad shit you are doing is unfortunately too great. Its always going to be possible to hide a conspiracy. Information asymmetry rules the world around you.
I find the logic of Schmidt and Zuckerberg to be extremely self serving, where can we know all the details of their online and offline life, like they seek to know about ours?
> Information asymmetry rules the world around you.
True. Good point. But is information asymmetry becoming larger or smaller? I would argue that it becomes smaller, but I have nothing to prove it.
An anecdotal example out of my memory, is Kofi Annan saying in an interview, that he started to use Google, more and more instead of having to ask his assistants. Another example are journalists, able to uncover secret CIA locations with Google. Or a single whistleblower, Edward Snowden, able to leak a good part of the NSA's secret operations with just a USB stick.
Sure, the NSA has more knowledge than ever. But the average Internet user, too, has unprecedented access to personal information of strangers. Just knowing your real name will likely allow me to find your location, employment, a picture of you and much more. So has the information asymmetry between us and the NSA grown or shrunk?
> But is information asymmetry becoming larger or smaller?
I think the asymmetry is becoming larger. Certainly in absolute terms we all have more information about one another than we did before, but the problem now is not having the information, it's searching through it to find the relevant information. Or being able to act on the information.
What can you as an ordinary individual do with a publicly available list of corrupt government officials? What can a corrupt president or FBI director do with a publicly available list of political opponents?
That favors the people, who will always have way more manpower to search and process the data than the elites who try to hide it. The more information in the public realm, the more that scores of interested scholars, journalists, statisticians, lawyers and other such professionals can use the tools of their trade to come to useful conclusions. Of course, most people could do nothing with such information, but released into the wild, even minor outrage can cause real change.
I think the biggest problem with this idea is the question of who gets to decide what the social norms and what is "acceptable". Our social norms are influenced by the media, the politicians and laws that they pass, so certain people in power positions will have an advantage. You can see this in a lot of countries (latest with gays in Russia, but countries like Iran and Germany are historic, extreme examples).
If for instance gays and atheists are exposed as "deviants" in the media, but corruption and hiring prostitutes are downplayed as something "every politician is doing", then it doesn't really matter who shares what: The openly gay, atheist politician will have a hard time (and perhaps be put in prison) while the corrupt ones walk free.
Sure. But they are also formed by our personal observation. If you would find out that lots of your colleagues, friends, family members and celebrities behave in 'strange' activities, those activities might not be perceived as strange after a while anymore.
Of course, you're right to point to the negative examples of Russia, Iran and Germany. Laws and norms can change both ways. This has been the case with antisemitism. It used to be quite accepted to be Jewish during the Second Reich in Germany but wasn't anymore in the Third. As another example, as far as I know, the Dutch had census data about the religion of every citizen, which only became a problem when they became occupied by Germany with its laws against Jewish.
But what now? Its all to easy to imagine a future with hardly any privacy. How will it look like? How should it look like if we take the end of privacy as a given, at least as a gedankenspiel.
My slightly pessimistic view is that the ones with resources would be able to keep their privacy and use that to their advantage, while the less fortunate would not.
Popular opinion might change, but as we've seen laws can change much more quickly, and even things that most people would consider normal could become a punishable offense.
At that point, for the people who already have the data on their lives out there, it will be too late to do anything about it, while the people who have been smart enough to live "perfectly normal" lives with the correct political and religious views, or those who can hire people to cover their tracks, will be better off.
I don't think he was referring to all his users. I use Facebook, and I don't upload all my private information. Just the stuff I don't mind the whole world seeing. I think that someone who just uploads everything is at the very least naive, I might even go so far as to call them "dumb fucks" in certain contexts.
You're right in that we can't be certain without additional evidence that he was targeted primarily because of who he was. I've edited my comment. But it is certain that the investigation into Gov. Spitzer's activities began as a result of bank employees examining his accounts, specifically, and that there were no other clients of the madam who were publicly exposed.
Regarding "PEP" surveillance, I would say that transparency is good, but there is nothing transparent about a process whereby people's activities are reported to data collection centers in secret, and then through some unknown and mysterious process culled and sorted.
Public scrutiny is good. But selective secret scrutiny, scrutiny only of politicians who threaten powerful constituencies, is a disaster for democracy.
There is a great documentary available on Netflix called 'Client 9' that talks about the circumstances surrounding his downfall. As they tell it in the film there were several very wealthy people actively paying PR firms and private investigators to dig up dirt on Spitzer.
I'd rather he (anyone) blows his biscuits with a hooker than live a life of misery (at best) or go on a violent rampage or something, driven by sexual frustration (at worst). Some laws are wrong. Drugs, prostitution and indiscriminate surveillance, for instance.
Getting laid is a basic need, like breathing, eating and parking a chocolate hostage.
All three of these are things that have always, do, and will always happen. Accepting that, legalising it, and overseeing it results in fewer deaths, less violence, heath care for prostitutes, extra tax income, and a transparent democracy.
Part of the complexity with this particular example is that Spitzer was known for going after prostitution. So, in addition to the issue of legality, he was also a hypocrite. Hypocracy doesn't always need to be a condemnation, but in his case it was a hypocracy which put others in jail.
I look at his case the same way I look at all those anti-gay politicians who are secretly gay. They hate themselves and in order to compensate for that internal conflict they put a lot of effort into a public show of opposing what are their own internal demons.
The misery they cause the people who get caught up in their personal psychodrama is unacceptable. But I think this type of problem is orthogonal to politicians who engage in illegal activities (e.g. being gay hasn't been illegal for a long time), it is more of a loss of perspective.
Well I had not realised that call-girls were illegal in the US. So yes, I guess it makes sense.
It doesn't seem particularly bad though, it's not like he had embezzled millions or committed crimes. Or actually... that is what most politicians do or have done, and even once it's known they usually can still keep their career.
As mentioned, Spitzer, before he was Governor, was the Attorney General of New York. As Attorney General he aggressively prosecuted prostitution. For him to be caught with prostitutes was not only illegal but made him look terrible. He was sworn in as Governor in January and was forced to resign over the prostitution scandal in either March or April so he wasn't Governor for very long.
So this is how it work for a lone partisan actor in the NSA:
1. Eve, the malicious analyst, wants to tank Herman Cain's campaign. She decides to look for dirt on him.
2. Using XKEYSCORE or another database, she inputs queries to collect his email traffic, and enters his public telephone number for call records. She requests chained results so she can get traffic and call records from his associates as well.
3. Some results show up in her inbox. Before she can read them, her auditor comes to her desk to ask her why she input a U.S. person's name, a likely U.S. person's email address, and a U.S. telephone number that hasn't been annotated as belonging to a foreigner in her justification (which she left blank). Without any good justification, she is escorted from the building and has her clearance revoked. Game over. She is eaten by a grue.
She is lucky she didn't target a congressman, because she'd be in violation of policy that requires all congressman targeting to go through DIRNSA.
Basically, the only way for this to work would be to get the analyst, auditor, supervisor, and IG to be all radicals in the same political party. And they all have no problem with losing their clearances if they're found out.
The case began because a woman, a foreign national employed by the U.S. government, told another employee she suspected the man with whom she was in a sexual relationship was listening to her calls. The employee who misused the NSA's systems also incidentally collected the communications of a U.S. resident on two occasions, a move that requires a court warrant. [1]
This was only discovered because she suspected something and talked about it to a colleague, we don't even know if the perpetrator has been disciplined. How many NSA analysts have been disciplined or had their clearance revoked for misusing these tools?
Obama flip-flopped on FISA [1]. He was blatantly aware of the risks it imposed.
The question is why? Did someone pay him a little visit? Did some man in a black suit and dark glasses show him a little manila envelope with unknown contents, that caused him to change his mind?
One year ago I would have said this was an insane proposition. Now after Snowden, I'm not that sure. That is what is really scary about the surveillance state.
It doesn't strike me as particularly far out. It's not as if no-one has, say, hired the Mafia to rig the US presidential election for them within living memory.
I think you miss the point, almost anyone can be discredited with enough information and power. Take a look at Russian elections, there were no other viable candidates for a reason.
Attribute properly, after all the guy that said it was one of the greatest politicians ever to walk the world and the creator of modern Secret Service type organizations.
Why does the HN mob downvote this, but upvote anything related to transparency? I thought transparency, especially amongst our elected officials, was a good idea?
If a candidate for major office pays for sex, does the public have the right to know?
I worry more about people high up inside the national-security state using their insider knowledge to help take down a politician. Is part of the deference they enjoy due to politicians worrying about that too?
There is an argument[1] that this may have been what took out General Patreaus. It was no coincedence he was removed from the Army and put into the CIA post just prior to catching Bin Laden [2,3]. Patreus would have received all of the credit, not Obama. But we know that the prep work for Bin Laden involved building a replicate of the abbatobad compound in the US, etc. so was well underway under the leadership of Patreus, not Panetta. Obama was very wary of Patreus entereing the 2012 elections, and would have been a much more credible candidate than any republican. In the end, Patreus was of course done in by someone snooping through his gmail. Wether or not he was also the victim of a parallel construction, in how that came about, we'll never know.
[1] ie, Informal line of resoning or logic. In this case, circumstantial.
[2] edit: The move was orchestrated and announced earlier in the spring. viz: On April 28, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that he had nominated Petraeus to become the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
[3] Bin Laden: Died May 2, 2011 (aged 54)
Abbottabad, Pakistan 34°10′9″N 73°14′33″E
It has to be taken with a very large pinch of salt since there is no documentation and no named sources, but in July Jack Murphy reported that his sources in the CIA told him that the "seventh floor" at CIA wanted Petraeus out and used his affair to do it. And that Clapper and Petraeus had a heated meeting where Petraeus was informed that he would be resigning.
The fact that we can't be sure that he wasn't being blackmailed with something even more scandalous demonstrates the problem perfectly. There is no reason to believe that he was, but you can't say it is impossible now that we have documentation proving their capabilities. That is why this sort of dragnet mass surveillance is so dangerous to a democracy. It undermines the legitimacy of the political process.
I'm quite certain Petraeus has been removed for a different reason than we were told. They can't trust him for having an affair? Give me a break. If he was on their side they wouldn't have ratted him out like that. And you can be certain that FBI agent didn't go to the media on his own, but had to ask his higher-ups about it first.
There was no real need for top down NSA surveillance here. All you needed was someone sympathetic to your cause ("an operative") who could infiltrate the oppositions meetings, with a cell phone.
Julian Sanchez identified this precise problem back in 2008 (and I'm sure he wasn't the first either).
Sanchez cites examples of Truman using an FBI wiretap on a potential supreme court nominee and Johnson wiretapping Martin Luther King and indirectly wiretapping presidential candidate Richard Nixon (ironic given how crazy Nixon went with wiretapping once he got into office).
> Let's fix this before it causes a scandal even bigger than Watergate—or permits behavior more scandalous than Watergate that is never uncovered, rectified or punished.
That's the thing. It can not be "fixed", it will not (although our representatives will offer all kinds of PR actions/"legislations" to try to calm us down and "accept it"). This kind of power is already strong enough to defend itself. Rather, it's going to become stronger (also because it is being attacked). It will take some sort of serious revolution for this sort of cancer to be undone. And for that to happen, we're going to have to feel some serious pain, first. That's our nature.
Moving the marker from apathy to critical thought, in the masses, is the thing I think. That, and fixing the central banking cartel and the military industrial complex, I suppose.
He is showing how his argument stands whether or not the reader believes that this has already happened. His stance only strengthens his argument, since he makes it clear that his argument doesn't rely on a conspiracy theory.
Well for one thing is you make a specific allegation it can be denied and the story becomes did they/didn't they story and breaks down readers along partisan lines rather than being about the really key issue which is could they.
This is extremely scary, and it also seems like a better way of phrasing the argument for the general populace to realize what mass surveillance is capable of. I don't think most people would argue in favor of Watergate type spying, evidenced by how Nixon resigned shortly after it was revealed. Hopefully this kind of tack will be used more and more to get these stories to resonate with the average non-techie person and get them worked up enough to care.
Definitely should review them then haha. Looking at it now "shortly" was the wrong word to use. He got re-elected after the initial story leaked, but more things started leaking, like the 18-minute gap in the tapes, and other things started to unravel.
Although, I think the fact that the cover up was so grand is pretty good evidence that the general populace is against that type of behavior once they become aware of it's magnitude.
I hope the general populace is against it, but there are so many cases of worse stuff that I have come to doubt it. It seems like if you look good on TV the populace gives you a rather large pass.
If your political system depends on convincing your average non-techie person to believe sensible things, then your political system has a design flaw.
Only in the age of degenerate democracy would people imagine that the only alternative to mob rule is dictatorship, and fantasize that the two are opposites.
Previous NSA whistle blower Russ Tice [1] has stated that the NSA targeted Barack Obama (in 2004), Diane Feinstein, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, David Petraeus, Colin Powell, and Supreme Court nominees.
To me its bloody frustrating to look at a problem, and see it wallow around in all its greedy and obese glory. Its really frustrating to think the mechanisms for changing the problem are co-opted. Makes you feel a bit impotent. This overreach, and the general military-industrial complex, to me, are sickening. I don't understand how it survives the light of day.
In the state of Wisconsin, numerous stories point to Governor Walker's staff vetting hires based on their political activity. For example, withdrawing a candidate they proposed for a governance position with the University of Wisconsin because they subsequently learned he had signed the recall position (for the sake of a family member and their job; the candidate is actually a staunch Walker supporter, himself).
(This being my and many others' determination based upon detailed accounting of the story, despite subsequent PR spin to the contrary.)
It's widely suspected that Governor Walker has ambitions for a 2016 run for the Presidency. Or maybe 2020.
One has to wonder what such an Administration might get up to with respect to surveillance results feeding bias.
"Conservative" or "Liberal". I don't want that power in either hands.
Abuse of state apparatus has been a risk throughout history. The Internet has now joined the informant, undercover agent, letter, telegram, phone, microphone and video camera as technologies of surveillance. The state has had these older options available for a long, long time and democracy has survived so far. In fact, technology allows us to implement safeguards which are more infallible than a mere human. A blacklist of current and candidate politicians, for example, would be easy to implement in software. However, the main defense against abuse has always been a system of checks and balances combined with the rule of law.
These allegations are very dangerous: they undermine confidence in the democratic system. What will happen next? Will they start calling for violent revolution? We must stop these irresponsible journalists before it is too late.
I liked the point about "Bizarro Edward Snowden" acting on conscience to spy on and take down nsa threats as a sort of lone gunman of information. Don't get me wrong, I'm one of those conspiracy theorists who believes there's a piece of bureaucracy somewhere that's a little more formal which serves that purpose, but the idea certainly makes the whole conspiracy a little more approachable.
Let's fix this before it causes a scandal even bigger than Watergate—or permits behavior more scandalous than Watergate that is never uncovered, rectified or punished.
What does he think he is, some sort of time-traveler?
Hahaha, that's a good one. Lets just upload our votes to the net. Then we can outsource our voting machines to Diebold and neglect any sort of actual engineering for hardware tamper resistance. At this point, I'm wondering who hasn't cheated voters yet.
The government probably watches over everyone in a position of power, regardless of their political opinions. It wants to make sure that the people in power aren't corrupt and aren't being manipulated. I'm pretty sure President Obama explicitly mentioned that in one of his statements.
I think this "theory" of election manipulation is tenuous at best. Pull off election manipulation would take a lot of balls, a lot of secrecy, and a lot of collaboration... three things an organization as diverse as the government does not have.
I'm not saying it's impossible to pull off, but the risk (potential political blowback) would certainly outweigh the reward.
Pull off election manipulation would take a lot of balls, a lot of secrecy, and a lot of collaboration... three things an organization as diverse as the government does not have.
There is strong evidence this has been done in the recent past on a massive scale, in the US, by the intelligence agencies and president - see Nixon's plumbers, and J Edgar Hoover, and that was before these capabilities were available. Your assumption about a conspiracy being required is completely unfounded [1]. That is not a theory, that is fact, and it is in no way tenuous, so it lends serious credibility to the idea that in the present new tools are being used in similar ways.
The other point which lends this credibility is the evidence we have seen of use of these powers for all sorts of industrial and political espionage abroad - they are doing exactly this sort of activity abroad (e.g. bugging Merkel before she was leader, Petrobras, Belgacom) - I find it highly likely they are also using these powers at home, at the very least to stymie investigations into their power. Note how obedient to the wishes of the spying agencies almost every politician is.
it wants to make sure that people in power aren't corrupt and aren't being manipulated
You seem to trust the current admin, even though they have been shown to lie repeatedly (Clapper, Obama [2]). Why do you trust that if given power they would use it in your best interests and to clean up politics, doesn't that strike you as somewhat naive given the huge compromises every politician has to make just to get elected president?
> The government probably watches over everyone in a position of power, regardless of their political opinions. It wants to make sure that the people in power aren't corrupt and aren't being manipulated.
What is the government if not "the people in power", and if it is, how can it make sure they're not corrupt?
You're talking about The Watchers watching themselves, which just doesn't work all that well. Besides, as grey-area points out, that ship has sailed long ago. Governments (and the shadowy figures pulling the strings behind them) are all corrupt, evil sacks of shit.
it might not even be Obamas team leaking. Lets sat a partisan person who works for the NSA wants to destroy a candidate. They could in fact do all the research themselves rather than anyone even close to Obama.
I look at one direct example of Herman Cain. How did the press ever get ahold of the fact that he was paying women out? Literally, you could say the women spoke up, but with the NSA, you could say someone who works at the NSA leaked the information just because they didn't like Herman Cain to begin with.
Now that's scary. Someone's reputation could be destroyed just by a rogue NSA agent.